Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
10/24/2014
A contract for the completion of a front end engineering design (FEED) study for the subsea pipeline portion of Royal Dutch Shell’s Peterhead Carbon Capture and Storage project was awarded late last week to the engineering firm, Wood Group Kenny. The contract will span six months and will include the development of a landfall solution at the Peterhead Power Station, designing a carbon export pipeline from the power station to a subsea tie-in with the existing Goldeneye pipe and a new subsea intervention valve with will include a controls system and tie-in spools. “We are honoured to be involved in this unique project in the North Sea. Using our 30 years of subsea infrastructure design, Wood Group Kenny is well placed to deliver high-quality cost-effective solutions that will help achieve the targets of the UK Government,” Wood Group Kenny Regional Director Bob MacDonald said in a release.
The Peterhead project will retrofit CCS technology onto a 385 MW portion of an existing gas-fired power plant in Scotland, transporting the CO2 via the existing Goldeneye underground pipeline and storing it in a depleted gas field in the North Sea. The project is expected to capture about 85 percent of the CO2 from the power station, at 1 million tonnes of CO2 a year, and it would be the world’s first industrial-scale CCS project for a gas power plant. The project is expected to be operational by the end of the decade. “So far, more than 20 Front End Engineering and Design subcontracts have been awarded supporting both the Peterhead and White Rose CCS Commercialisation Programme projects,” Business, Enterprise and Energy Minister Matthew Hancock said in a release.
Currently, both the Peterhead and White Rose CCS projects await final investment decisions from the British government, which Parliament has called on the government to make by early next year. The government, however, has cited ongoing FEED studies as a reason to hold off on making those decisions. “Until FEED is complete, projects carry unacceptable and/or unquantifiable levels of risk for either Government or the developers to take a decision to invest,” the government said in a mid-September response to the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee for a more aggressive timeline.
